Influence of GPU to game streaming

[dkm777]

So, my brother is a hardcore League Of Legends and Starcraft II player and streams his matches. He has a Q9650 OC'd to 3.6GHz and I'm giving him my GTX560 Ti this weekend. Does a better GPU improve streaming somewhat or is it totally CPU dependent? I'm thinking about increasing the CPU overclock to 4.2GHz as well.

 

[ViRGE]

It would be totally CPU dependent. The GPU doesn't have any part in it besides passing frames back to the CPU.

 

[Cerb]

Not sure about LoL, but I would imagine the same applies.

For SC2, even at 3.6GHz, a Core 2 simply cannot compare to a Core i 2nd gen, for SC2. For SC2, unless he has worse than a GTS 450 or HD 5670 (5770 w/ AA enabled) right now, a new video card will net him either nothing or nearly nothing (game detail level is also highly CPU-dependent). A Core i3-2120 would easily be superior even to a 4.2Ghz Core 2.

 

[dkm777]

He has something worse - a GF9600GT DDR2. Was a leftover from his old rig. I'll have to ask him what kind of FPS is he getting now. If I receive my GTX570 today or tomorrow then we'll be switching cards on the weekend as planned and I'll tell you what kind of FPS he gets then. When I last played LoL on that rig with a GTX560 Ti I could max it out at 1920x1200 without any noticeable slowdown, but I didn't have SCII at that time.

 

[AtenRa]

I believe SC2 will see a big boost in fps with the GTX560 vs 9600GT even with the C2Q at 3.6GHz.

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page5.html

 

[Rackmountsales]

Once your graphics card is over a certain level of performance it's all down to your CPU. Then the two factors, CPU and GPU increase together to give better fps. Upgrading one without the other will have little effect. The 4890 is a good card, all the 5xxx series really give you is DirectX 11, something that does nothing for ArmA.

 

[Stuka87]

Since SC2 is primarily a CPU bound game, and is only dual threaded, you just need lots of clock speed on two cores. Which is where SNB comes in handy. It can basically shut down those other cores and crank up the primary two.

Although with streaming, that uses a fair amount of CPU to compress the video stream. So the other two cores are being used.

But to answer the same question everybody already did, the video card certainly help over that 9600, but it will not help in streaming at all.

 

[Cerb]

The 560 Ti will be better than a 9600, but the improvement should be only minor, unless his graphics settings are currently too high for the 9600.

I started paying SC2 with a 7800GT, and w/ AA off, was CPU-limited. With a GTX 460, I can turn AA on, and again be CPU-limited. We got several good years out of them, but our Core 2s are finally getting to that point where they need to retire.